Parenting & Family Quote by William Godwin

Godwin reaches for the family not to sentimentalize love, but to drag it out of the perfume aisle and into moral daylight. In an era when romantic passion was being newly glamorized (and newly commodified) by novels and polite society, he points to the parent-child bond as love’s “great model” because it looks less like appetite and more like obligation sustained over time. The phrase “subsists between” matters: love here isn’t a lightning strike, it’s a living arrangement, something that survives boredom, inconvenience, and asymmetry.

That asymmetry is the subtext. Parent-child affection is famously unequal in power and capacity; a child cannot “repay” a parent in any fair ledger. By making this the template, Godwin nudges love away from exchange and toward disinterested care, a key move for a thinker trying to ground ethics in rational benevolence rather than tradition or religious authority. It also quietly challenges the period’s property-minded family structure: if the best love is not possession, then children are not extensions of parental status, and marriage is not a contract for managing inheritance with feelings as decoration.

Context sharpens the edge. Godwin was writing into revolutionary arguments about how society should be organized, what people owe each other, and whether morality can be engineered without kings or priests. Elevating parental love is strategic: it’s the one form of affection even skeptics hesitate to dismiss. He borrows its credibility to make a broader claim: the most defensible love is the kind that keeps showing up, takes responsibility, and doesn’t require desire to justify itself.